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sila: wow!! looks like the students got into it. i love the differences in terminology. very innovativesila: nice! Dini rocks. very brave of her to throw candy at stormtrooperssila: we love the skype sessions! and that photo is hilarious! hopefully we’ll be able to have more fun se…Hisham: Thanks, Daniel. The bases are downloaded from One Monk Miniatures but later minis have stands acquire…Daniel: Nice work! I’m hoping you might let me know how the bases go together?Roberto: Your blog is amazing!!!! Thank you!!!!!sila: we loved singing happy birthday to you!!! yay to cake and nasi rempah! oooh ask yong for the recipe …Edward: I had forgotten how magnificently snarky you could be. My bad.
I really do have to get to Malaysia so…

About

Hisham and Sila has been writing stuff down on this weblog since 2005. Sometimes they post photos of family, sometimes they talk about film, books and music, sometimes there is artwork and stuff about tabletop gaming.

Andrew's Venusian glider-morphed Wandering Ina (a.k.a. Kana) and Matthew's Badal Jones the Lunar Lagrange Alliance Envoy were absent and was used as NPCs at crucial times of the session.

Ivan GMed, as this photo shows:

The mission, which continued from the previous session, was to help Badal Jones with the security for his LLA ambassador's contingent as they attended the art show that would display the Factors' alien sculpture pieces collected by the reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos at the Cumulus Hotel on Aphrodite Prime. There was a second, a more secretive mission from Gretchen Ambelina of Pax Familae: which is to sabotage the art show. The team had decided that these two missions could be run side-by-side without any conflicts of interests.

Adventures in Lumpy Space

First thing in the morning, Cable aided Hokusai to build up Rep for his art social media meshsite renamed Obloquy (the original name Digital Easel didn't have a controversial online activist vibe enough. Also it sucked). Hokusai would update socially controversial artwork, slam heads together, induce squabbling then try to gain and sift intel from squabblers, by pushing the right buttons with people in F-Rep circles. Hokusai's cover ID in Obloquy was Pickman Algol, Cable's was The Lumpy Space Ambassador and although he hadn't activated his account yet, DANAI planned on being an online troll with an opposing viewpoint named Shasta.

Hokusai uploaded a digital painting of the disc of the planet Venus with three layers. The top third of the planet - encompassing the northern hemisphere - showed greenery and life. The middle equatorial third showed Venus' surface as it was. The bottom third was a mishmash of darkness and burning human skeletons that trailed bits of flame and debris into space.

Apparently this "Pickman Algol" dandy was against the terraforming of Venus.

It started when we thought about inviting Emma's forthcoming family-in-law for dinner. It just so happened that it was on Irfan's weekend's birthday! So unlike other years, Irfan had more people over for his birthday than before, including the forementioned forecoming familiy-in-law of Farid's, Irfan's cousin Aiman and Zara, and his schoolmate Fikri our neighbour from the next tower (but the same arcology - so to speak).

Irfan sliced up his cake using his melee weapons skill.

I got a photo of Ain with Irfan. But because everyone was busy with guests, no photo of me was taken.

I totally forgot when this Triumph came up.

Barreling Through the Badlands

The mission began in the morning. B'ura and Hondo were joined by a Rutian Twi'lek female named Numa. She was in her early twenties and bore a blaster pistol and a vibroknife. Kablo brought them to the east end of Nabat where a tech crew was rolling out an old landspeeder from storage. They were to head east through the badlands for about 300 klicks.

At first piloting a speeder over the badlands was a cinch. Then rocky mounds appeared, and forced Hondo to steer carefully past the dangerous rocks. However (with a Piloting - Planetary roll that resulted in a Triumph) Hondo was able to swerve past all obstacles with no problems.

Fifty klicks from New Meen a tall mound of reddish, misshappen rocks loomed to their right as they passed it. (Hondo failed a Perception check so...) A sniper blaster bolt struck the speeder's right engine. Failing to avert a crash, both Hondo and Numa were lightly injured, and B'ura was unhurt. Numa used a stimpack to treat her own wounds and pulled back behind the crashed speeder's chassis.

Edged by the Empire

Episode 02 Rugged Road to the Ryll Mines, Part 1

Last Monday, Irfan and I finally continued his Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG adventures. I ran The Long Arm of the Hutt free downloadable adventure (PDF download, low res version, 2.4MB) from Fantasy Flight Games' website with some alterations to the story and non-player characters.

With the new EotE Core Rulebook, Irfan earlier created his own player character based on the Beginner Game pregenerated character Pash. His new PC in named Hondo Pash, a smuggler with a pilot specialisation, and purchased the Talents Let's Ride, Galaxy Mapper and Skilled Jockey. He wields a DH-17 blaster pistol and a vibrosword. His story continues from Pash's story from Escape from Mos Shuuta from the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game.

His Obligation was to the safety of his younger sister Yuzy Pash who lived on Tatooine. Fortunately, the Obligation was not triggered at the start of the game.

Previously, Hondo, who escaped the wrath of Teemo the Hutt - a crime boss based in the city of Mos Shuuta on Tatooine - by evading the Hutt's thugs, Imperial stormtoopers and stole the Krayt Fang, a rust-colored YT-1300 light freighter that belonged to Trex, a Trandoshan bounty hunter. After a brief skirmish with TIE fighters launched from an Imperator-class Star Destroyer, Hondo made a short jump to lightspeed and escaped his pursuers.

Quick Pause at the Heliopause

The Krayt Fang reverted back to realspace at the edge of the Tatooine system. There were loud klaxons, flashing alert icons at the navicomputer and loud snorting and grunting sounds coming from the cockpit speakers. Worst of all, there was a nasty stench from which there was no escape aboard the ship. Hondo tried to determine the source of the spoor but failed. (And thus incurred a Setback die for every dice pool thereon.)

Hondo shut off the klaxons and the Gamorrean opera (he discovered on the audio player's playlist). Then he found that one of the alert icons denoted that fuel was low. The navicomputer tagged the Ryloth system as the only location the ship could reach to refuel before fuel was depleted. However, he was unable to decipher the second alert icon.

The smuggler made the jump to Ryloth without any problem. (The Galaxy Mapper talent removed the stench-caused Setback die to the Astrogation roll.)

The Pui-ui was a sapient species created by Brian Daley for his 1980 novel Han Solo and the Lost Legacy. (I love the book. I've even ran games that took different gaming groups to Dellalt a few times.) I searched the internet for pictures of them but none was to be found. So I thought I'd paint some simple sketches of the alien. According to the Wookieepedia article there were two versions descibed in two different versions of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe.

There were suggestions on Twitter for me to draw both versions. So here they are, each with character ideas for RPGs.

Pui-ui Explorer, Slaviscek variant.

It had been awhile since we went for a picnic at the waterfalls of Ulu Langat. So last Sunday, we went for a morning drive out to the country and headed for the Sungai Gabai picnic area near the small town of Sungai Lui. Ain had made mee goreng the previous night for the picnic.

I was worried that there would be excessive traffic because of the three-day Malaysia Day holiday weekend, but because it was early in the morning the roads were clear and parking was relaively easy. However, there were a lot of visitors already there at the picnic site.

We have been at Sungai Gabai once before, but I could barely remember the earlier visit. We would remember this visit as we got wet in the river and had mee goreng there. Also, because we took photos and there's a blog post about this visit. So yeah, it would be remembered. Unless the blog died for some reason and I lost all the photos and we did not talk about it for decades after. But I digress.

Without using any sort of airborne drones we identified an empty spot by the river on the far bank, so we crossed the bridge to take it.

I took a photo of the falls while we crossed the bridge. We did not approach the falls during this visit. Perhaps later.

Westward, the role-playing game from Wicked North Games whose development I have been involved with in this past year, has finally been released. Westward is a game of steampunk wild west set on an human-colonized extrasolar planet.

Players and gamemasters of this game play and create adventures around humans whose ancestors were marooned on the planet Westward centuries ago. Lack of conventional power generation has created new technology that uses exotic local minerals and steam to build airships and steam-powered mech. Politics of the cities and settlements make for great conflict for players to embroil themselves in. And deadly alien creatures and hazards await adventurers in the dry badlands of Westward.

I'd like to thank Wicked North Games for the opportunity to work on this product and with a host of talented writers and artists, some of which have been people I've admired since the early '90s.

Last time on Eclipse Phase: Clouds of a Morning Star the team was joined by Matthew's player character Christoph de Beers from the Jovian Republic.

However, there was a quantum temporal flux and the character metamorphed into the Lunar Lagrange Alliance envoy Badal Jones, a Welshman. The out-of-character retcon avoided difficulties of roleplaying a character from a racist, pure humans-only society mixed with a group of posthuman player characters.

Jones had commissioned Gamera Security's services for the upcoming art gallery event at the Cumulus Hotel at Aphrodite Prime. The event would display Factors' alien sculpture pieces collected by the reclusive posthuman artist Marquis d’Homem-Christos who lived on the asteroid 163693 Atira and would be farcasting to Venus in a few days.

The mission objectives were clear: Jones engaged GamSec to protect the LLA ambassador during the show and (two session ago, when I was absent) Gretchen Ambelina informed Cable that she wanted the show to fail. The two objectives were not necessarily exclusive. They need to ensure the LLA visitors' safety while they sabotaged the event.

Here are a series of artwork for Salvage Ops card game by DWD Studios. Players play members from four space salvage corporations. Here are five of the gear in space derelicts that the players could grab for points during the game, and two of the hazard card artwork that might thwart your operations!